About six months ago, the United States Treasury had roughly $150 billion cash on hand after collecting annual taxes for 2012. According to some analysts, that was unusually high as Americans did whatever they could to avert the higher taxes coming in 2013.
But just days before the shutdown saga ended, the Treasury had been depleted down to a little over $30 billion in its operating accounts. The folks over at qz.com did some quick number crunching and realized that nine Standard & Poor’s 500 companies had more cash than the U.S. government. As a matter of fact, one company (General Electric) had nearly three times as much readily accessible cash than Uncle Sam.
But it’s not all bad news for the gubment, y’all. Even though the taxpayers are set to lose about $10 billion from the fed’s $49.5 billion bailout of General Motors, the U.S. Treasury has about $4 billion more cash on hand than the resurgent auto maker.
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